Essay About External Leader Behaviors And Work Team Success

Management
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Referring to the article, the main arguments presented by the authors is that external leader behaviors do support to the self-managing work team success. Their objective is also to increase the understanding of the role of external leader who is the leader to whom a team reports to. Self-managing work team are natural work groups where they work together to perform a task. They take on management into their works where each of them performs as a supervisors and managers. According to the article, leading a team that manages itself will need a distinctive approach of leadership. They carry out more responsible with more complex and demanding roles than the traditional team leadership. For the traditional team leadership they are more expected to lead by monitoring and managing those teams while the external leaders are expected to lead by monitoring and managing back to their teams. Subsequently, boundary spanning activities where external leader need to interact with various organizations who supply the team with resources and support is very essential to determine their success in that role. (Druskat and Wheeler, 2003: 435; Robbins, Bergman, Stagg and Coulter, 2003: 737) In order to be effective leader in the self-managing work teams which is also known as self-directed work teams, they must know how to influence a team and others in an organization. For instance, their ability to persuade their team members to listen, talk and accept advice will be much more advantage to them as a leader. Secondly, they ought to know how and with whom to build relationships which involve networking especially with their subordinates. There are times when self-management team need the leader to seek and scout for information too because when they do not receive the information there are the risk of becoming over bounded. Thus, ability of the leader to scout and share the information is very important as it will facilitate team self-management and the effectiveness. In self-management team they are expected to have their own decisions. Here is when external leaders come in to view and ensure that his or her team decisions support to the team effectiveness. In addition, the external leaders need to ensure their behaviors and strategies do meet with the expectation of the team self management and team effectiveness. (Druskat and Wheeler, 2003: 435; Williams, 1995) The authors have made some research to their objectives using the comparative multiple case study method. They choose two cases sample those with average and those with superior performance. This is to identify the behaviors and strategies that distinguish the performance of external leaders. In the two cases sample, the author wanted the superior performance to be considered as more outstanding according to the objectives and the assessments of the managers and team member whom they work with. Therefore, they use three criteria which is objective team performance, team member nominations for outstanding leaders and managers nominations for outstanding leaders to select the final sample from the pool of 66 external leaders. Team members and managers were questions to identify the most outstanding leaders in the plant by using the nomination process. They were given ballot listing names of all the 66 external leaders after they have participate in one of six two hour focus groups about the external leader role. From the result of the nomination, the authors found out that the mean of superior leaders who is in the leadership role is 14.6 and on the other hand the average performer mean is only 8.7. (Druskat and Wheeler, 2003: 435) Furthermore, observation was also carry on to the teams production processes and collect data from team members and managers to gain understanding to why and when leaders use the specific behaviors. Besides that interviews were carry on to obtain the managers point of views like what matter most to be success in the external leader role. As a result, they discovered 11 behaviors that have been used always by the superior performers. These 11 behaviors could be view in table 1 in the appendix section. However, after several discussions and reviews, the authors have categorized them into four functional of leader behaviors which are relating, scouting, persuading and empowering. These four functional clusters will lead to a well effective self-managing work team which brings a sign to the effective of external leadership. In these functional behaviors it is describe in two subsections which is organization-focused behaviour and team focused behaviour. (Druskat and Wheeler, 2003: 435) One of the functional of leader behaviors which discuss by the authors is relating. It involves developing social awareness and political relationship. They need this function because they are involved in the boundary spanning activities where they have to obtain information from the management or their teams. In the organization-focused behaviour, the